Meet Atlas, ARM’s New Superchip for Smartphones…and Servers

Startup Calxeda is betting that ARM's chip designs will pay off in the enterprise. Photo:Jon Snyder/Wired

ARM has a new chip for your smartphone. But CEO Warren East thinks it might just do the job in servers too.

On Tuesday, his company introduced two new chip designs, saying that one of them, in particular, could be the basis for a new type of server business. Called the Cortex-A57, the chip could give ARM a toehold in a server market that’s been traditionally dominated by Intel.

The announcement is the latest development in ARM’s attempt to establish itself as a credible threat to Intel in the data center server market. Intel owns about 90 percent of that market, but customers — especially big data center operators such as Facebook and Amazon — have been clamoring for lower-power servers. ARM, which has specialized in low-power designs for phones, thinks it has the answer.

The key to the A57 — which until Tuesday was known by its code-name Atlas — is that it can be used for 64-bit computing. This means that it performs better while doing certain types of calculations and that — most importantly — it can be used on computers that have more than 4 Gigabytes of memory.

ARM bills it as a low-power alternative to Intel’s Xeon processor as well as a chip for super-phones. “What we’re aiming at there are are very high levels of compute performance, but sill recognizing that these are going into the mobile space amongst others.”

But East is sanguine about ARM’s chances in the server space. “We don’t really expect this to be alike a switch going on overnight,” he said at a press event in San Francisco. “Our target for the 2014-2015 time period would be a very small market share. Perhaps by 2020 we would be talking about 20 percent.”

ARM also introduced a smaller, less powerful design called the Cortx-A53. While the A-57 is clearly the choice for server-makers, ARM expects chipmakers to license both processor cores and mix and match them inside multi-core servers and smart phones.